Add Fun to Your Scrum Board

Physical Boards Please

I recently started working with a team who had been introduced to scrum as part of their organization’s adoption of agile. Their only experience with scrum was through the lens of a popular agile project management tool that rhymes with alley, as in “After using this software I want to vomit in an alley”. When they had the chance to use a physical board, they jumped on it. I setup a very simple scrum board on the outside of a cubicle near the team. We used index cards and colored pushpins, the normal stuff. After a few days, the team was loving it. They enjoyed moving tasks around, pushing green pins into completed cards and keeping an eye on which tasks were in-progress.

Accidental WIP

That’s when I noticed something strange. When I setup the board, out of sheer laziness on my part (I kept pricking my finger reaching into the bag of push pins) I only provided them with three yellow pins and three red pins, one for each member of the team. In doing so, I had created this artificial WIP limit. The team treated the yellow and red pins as their “own” as in, “this is my yellow pin”. At first I just though this was a neat little side effect of the circumstances, but then I realized I could capitalize on the situation by adding some personality to the board.

The last time you played Monopoly™, the board game, did anyone make a big deal about choosing their token? I bet they did, that seems to happen every time I play. There’s always the guy who has to be the race car or the top hat or whatever. People are serious about their monopoly pieces.

So back to the scrum board. I wondered to myself, could I somehow affix monopoly pieces to these push pins? With a quick trip to eBay for a bag of random monopoly pieces and some super glue, I had the answer. Yes, it can be done.

I presented the idea to the team and let them know that if they wanted to use a special push pin they could, or if they’d like to use a regular one that was fine too. The initial reaction was all smiles, quickly followed by, “I’m gonna go first before anyone else picks the race car!”